This weekend’s Willow Hill Heritage Festival marks the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Willow Hill School. The theme of the 2025 Festival is: “Preserving the History of the Willow Hill Community: From Oral Traditions to Community Archiving – You Too Have a Story to Tell,” which highlights “the power of local memory and the importance of preserving the voices that shaped our communities.”
The Willow Hill Heritage & Renaissance Center occupies the 1950s building and campus of the Willow Hill School, which was founded in 1874 by families of formerly enslaved people for their children.
“This festival is about honoring the past while investing in the future,” said Dr. Alvin D. Jackson, MD, the Center’s Board President.
The three-day festival will open with the 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 29 ribbon cutting of the new outdoor community space and continue with museum tours.
On Saturday, the William James High School Class of 1968 will host a “Welcome Breakfast” at 8 a.m., followed by a tour of the museum as part of their class reunion celebration.
The featured presentation of the Festival begins at 1 p.m., entitled: “The Heroism of the Black Men of the Willow Hill Community During the 1946 Gubernatorial Election.”
The program was developed for the Association of African American Museums Conference and honors the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
The presentation will be followed by a Community Archiving panel, featuring:
• Dr. Ronald W. Bailey, PhD, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign — a nationally recognized expert on Black political thought and community archives.
• LaPortia Mosley, Community Engagement Officer at the Georgia Historical Society, presenting the statewide Community Archives Initiative
After the panel, an interview with Bulloch County Commissioner Ray Mosley will focus on local leadership, legacy and vision for the future, followed by interactive archiving workshops and oral history interviews.
“We’re especially excited to host voices like Dr. Bailey, LaPortia Mosley, and Commissioner Ray Mosley, who help bring these important conversations to life,” Dr. Jackson said.
The festival will conclude Sunday with “Gospelfest” from 2-4 p.m., offering fellowship and an afternoon of Gospel music.
All of the weekend’s events and activities are free and open to the public. Lunch on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, both prepared by Mosley Farms, will be available for purchase.
Museum tours, including guided as well as self-guided tours, will be available all three days of the Festival. For a description of exhibits – which include those inside the Willow Hill School building, plus, outside on the campus, the reassembled, one-room Bennett Grove Schoolhouse – see www.willowhillheritage.org/exhibits.
About Willow Hill
Roughly a decade after the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved residents of the Willow Hill area near Portal established the school for their children. The core families included the Donaldsons, the Riggs, the Halls and the Parishes.
These “families, post-slavery, they became landowners and owned up to six thousand acres of land in the Willow Hill community,” Dr. Jackson said. “They founded the Willow Hill school in 1874 as one of the first schools in Bulloch County for African Americans, just a few years after the Civil War.”